October 26, 1918—With his psyche collapsing faster than the war effort he had spearheaded, German commander Erich Ludendorff resigned under pressure from Kaiser Wilhelm II and his new Chancellor Max von Baden.
Some might say that this is pushing a little too far, but I think that Ludendorff is one of those leaders who bear the responsibility for the loss of the finest young men of not one, but two generations of his country. His errors as, in effect, “national commander” of Germany in World War I—going beyond the Prussian tradition of obedience to rulers, since the general played a key role in the making of that policy—would have been grievous enough. But even worse might be his postwar furtherance of a demagogue who brought not merely ruin but also shame on Germany.
In the past half-century, three fine military minds achieved impressive, even astounding tactical successes, but steered their country toward severe or even catastrophic reverses because of blindness to larger strategic goals. Let’s take them in reverse chronological order—from most to least famous, but also from least to most interesting (at least, to me):
* Douglas MacArthur, in the first year of the Korean War, threw Communist forces on the defensive with a daring amphibious landing on the Inchon peninsula. But, claiming that he knew “the Oriental mind,” he blithely dismissed warnings that North Korea’s ally, Communist China, would intervene in force if the United Nationals troops he commanded crossed the Yalu River. The resulting counterattack wiped out virtually all the gains MacArthur made, prolonged the war for another two-and-a-half years, roughed up his pristine image of infallibility—and contributed to his loss of command.
Some might say that this is pushing a little too far, but I think that Ludendorff is one of those leaders who bear the responsibility for the loss of the finest young men of not one, but two generations of his country. His errors as, in effect, “national commander” of Germany in World War I—going beyond the Prussian tradition of obedience to rulers, since the general played a key role in the making of that policy—would have been grievous enough. But even worse might be his postwar furtherance of a demagogue who brought not merely ruin but also shame on Germany.
In the past half-century, three fine military minds achieved impressive, even astounding tactical successes, but steered their country toward severe or even catastrophic reverses because of blindness to larger strategic goals. Let’s take them in reverse chronological order—from most to least famous, but also from least to most interesting (at least, to me):
* Douglas MacArthur, in the first year of the Korean War, threw Communist forces on the defensive with a daring amphibious landing on the Inchon peninsula. But, claiming that he knew “the Oriental mind,” he blithely dismissed warnings that North Korea’s ally, Communist China, would intervene in force if the United Nationals troops he commanded crossed the Yalu River. The resulting counterattack wiped out virtually all the gains MacArthur made, prolonged the war for another two-and-a-half years, roughed up his pristine image of infallibility—and contributed to his loss of command.
* Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto believed that, if U.S. forces were to be fought, as the Japanese government had decided, then the American fleet at Pearl Harbor needed to be struck without warning so that naval operations in the Pacific could be totally disabled. (“"We can run wild for six months or a year, but after that I have utterly no confidence.”) The Japanese attack on December 7, 1941 did come off as a total shock and did deal America stunning losses at its Hawaii base. But the consequent furor in the U.S. wiped out all isolationist sentiment at a stroke, united the public behind four years of remorseless combat, fueled an anger that contributed to the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and led air force planes to intercept and kill the Japanese naval mastermind in 1943.
* Erich Ludendorff made sure that Russia ceased hostilities on the Eastern Front by secretly allowing V.I. Lenin to pass through Germany by armed train car from exile in Switzerland through neutral Sweden, where he eventually made his way back into Russia to foment a revolution. Lenin’s revolution did, as Ludendorff hoped, enable the movement of German troops toward the Western front—but it also installed a totalitarian Marxist regime that threatened German security for more than seven decades.
A second Ludendorff decision was less justified and produced more immediate dire results. Against the opposition of Baden, Ludendorff backed the Imperial Navy’s campaign to renew unrestricted submarine warfare, even though the initial effort to do so had only tilted American popular opinion sharply toward Great Britain’s.
Just as MacArthur pooh-poohed the idea of a Chinese intervention, Ludendorff professed not to fear an American entrance into the war. (Dutch or Danish intervention worried him. Go figure.) But, once Woodrow Wilson secured a declaration of war from Congress, the President was able to put at the disposal of the Allied high command four fresh divisions in the field by July 1918—the beginning of the end for Germany.
Nearly three weeks after his exit from the military, with his patron the Kaiser having abdicated and Germany concluding an armistice with the Allies to end the First World War, Ludendorff made one of the more ignominious departures from the stage of any defeated soldier—donning civilian clothes, a fake beard and blue spectacles as he took a train into Scandinavia. From there he wrote his wife: "My nerves are too much on edge and sometimes my speech gets out of control. There is no help for it, my nerves have simply gone to pieces!"
I ask you: Doesn't this all sound a bit like Captain Queeg and his strawberries in The Caine Mutiny? You half expect him to say next something like, "Where are my strawberries?"
In his article "Ludendorff: Tactical Genius, Strategic Fool" in the September/October 2008 issue of Military History Magazine, Williamson Murray credits the German with implementing effective, at times brilliant, innovations (developing the first modern defensive warfare doctrine for the era of machine guns and artillery) but also some terrible ideas, such as advocating the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare.
Perhaps Ludendorff’s reputation as the prime mover behind victory on the Eastern Front gained him a reprieve from popular revulsion over the war’s misery, because—at least with the far-right nationalist movement growing in Germany—few blamed him for the sorry outcome of the conflict.
Part of this had to do with his successful if shameless identification of scapegoats who could divert attention from his own actions. The war had not been lost by Germany’s brave soldiers nor their commanders, he said. Rather, it was the fault of Catholics, Communists and Jews—leftists who’d undermined the war effort.
Charles Bracelen Flood's Hitler: The Path to Power (1989) relates the key moment in this mythology. General Neill Malcolm, leader of the British Military Mission in Berlin, wanted to clarify Ludendorff's remarks about who was responsible for ending the war. In the early summer of 1919, the British general asked point-blank, “You mean that you were stabbed in the back?”
“That’s it exactly,” Ludendorff responded with the alacrity of one sensing a lifeboat. “We were stabbed in the back—stabbed in the back.” Before long, that notion of a Dolchstoss, or “stab in the back,” was being adopted wholesale. It became one of the foundation tenets of Nazism.
As a rewriting of history, however, Ludendorff’s statement is breathtaking in its hypocrisy and gall. None of the common soldiers at the time—including Adolf Hitler—knew that Ludendorff and General Paul von Hindenberg had pushed for an immediate end to hostilities at the end of September.
In his article "Ludendorff: Tactical Genius, Strategic Fool" in the September/October 2008 issue of Military History Magazine, Williamson Murray credits the German with implementing effective, at times brilliant, innovations (developing the first modern defensive warfare doctrine for the era of machine guns and artillery) but also some terrible ideas, such as advocating the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare.
Perhaps Ludendorff’s reputation as the prime mover behind victory on the Eastern Front gained him a reprieve from popular revulsion over the war’s misery, because—at least with the far-right nationalist movement growing in Germany—few blamed him for the sorry outcome of the conflict.
Part of this had to do with his successful if shameless identification of scapegoats who could divert attention from his own actions. The war had not been lost by Germany’s brave soldiers nor their commanders, he said. Rather, it was the fault of Catholics, Communists and Jews—leftists who’d undermined the war effort.
Charles Bracelen Flood's Hitler: The Path to Power (1989) relates the key moment in this mythology. General Neill Malcolm, leader of the British Military Mission in Berlin, wanted to clarify Ludendorff's remarks about who was responsible for ending the war. In the early summer of 1919, the British general asked point-blank, “You mean that you were stabbed in the back?”
“That’s it exactly,” Ludendorff responded with the alacrity of one sensing a lifeboat. “We were stabbed in the back—stabbed in the back.” Before long, that notion of a Dolchstoss, or “stab in the back,” was being adopted wholesale. It became one of the foundation tenets of Nazism.
As a rewriting of history, however, Ludendorff’s statement is breathtaking in its hypocrisy and gall. None of the common soldiers at the time—including Adolf Hitler—knew that Ludendorff and General Paul von Hindenberg had pushed for an immediate end to hostilities at the end of September.
Moreover, Ludendorff made this statement while under the care of a psychiatrist. Nothing wrong with that (in fact, I'll bet it was close to a first, since Sigmund Freud's theories were still relatively unknown to much of the general public). It's just that he had pretty much come undone by this point. "He had never seen a flower bloom, never heard a bird sing, never watched the sun set. I used to treat him for his soul."
It was probably fortunate for the general that the Allies put him on a list of people they'd like to try on war crimes. The resulting outcry united the populace against the victors of the war.
In 1923, Ludendorff, having thrown in his lot with radical nationalists, lent his remaining prestige to Adolf Hitler's "Beer Hall Putsch." The Prussian general sided with the anti-democratic forces in his country at a critical time, doing his nation an even worse disservice than before.
Ludendorff's critical mistakes, before and after the war, illustrate why it's best that generals confine themselves to the battlefield and leave the formation of war aims and overall strategy to democratically elected civilian authority.
No comments:
Post a Comment